Geopolitical reverberations of US migrant detention and deportation: The view from Ecuador

While recent scholarship has paid critical attention to the changing relationship between territory and borders, there remains much to be said about the ways in which borders are being pushed outwards via immigration enforcement. In this paper, I argue that one must look outside the borders of the policymaking state to understand the geopolitical depth and breadth of immigration enforcement policies and practices. I examine ways in which US migrant detention and deportation reverberate in Ecuador. Research in Ecuador with detained migrants' family members and deported migrants shows that the impacts of these policies are far from contained along with the migrant's incarcerated and "removed" body; instead, they extend spatially and temporally beyond US borders, and into local, personal spaces and places in Ecuador. I demonstrate that scrutiny of the extra-border geographies of immigration enforcement policies allows us to identify the uneven, unpredictable, and sometimes violent ways in which these policies expand in practice. This research also suggests that detention and deportation do not meet US policymakers' stated objective of deterring future migration.